The release of the blockbuster movie, Disney's Dumbo, reviews were full of praise for the film. Dark, ponderous Vladimir "Bill" Tytla, who is generally assigned to the "heavies", created the devil-giant for Fantasia's Night on Bald Mountain. Since he was doing the big elephants, he had to draw a Dumbo stand-in for the sequence in which Mrs. Jumbo recieves her baby via stork.

"I gave him everything I thought he should have," said Tytla. "It just happened. I don't know a damn thing about elephants. It wasn't that. I was thinking in terms of humans, and I saw a chance to do a chracter without using any cheap theatrics. Most of the expressions and mannerisms I got from my own kid. There's nothing theatrical about a two-year-old kid. They're real and sincere- like when they damn near wet their pants from excitement when you come home at night. I've bawled my kid out for pestering me when I'm reading or something, and he doesn't know what to make of it. He'll just stand there and maybe grab my hand and cry... I tried to put all those things in Dumbo."


Some weeks later TIME received the following communitcation from artist Tytla's wife, Adrienne Tytla:

When I am approached by an eager acquaintance who asks, "Is it true your child resembles an elephant, Mrs. Tytla?" (with the same expressions, incidently, as the gossiping elephants in Dumbo), I am compelled, like poor Mrs. Jumbo, to waddle off, as I mutter to myself, "A wit, no doubt." However, being fully aware of the havoc that can be wrought... on an impressionable small child, I am appealing to you, as a mother, to right this terrible wrong. (Besides, we have no space left in which to store the tons of peanuts that continue to arrive daily.) Therefore I have taken the liberty of sending you a photograph of Peter [see photo above]...

However, thank you. Peter has made a terrific hit with the small fry and they even allow him to ride his own tricycle...

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